Page 87 of Long Lost Winter

“Hell, I don’t know.”But he looked at her and sighed, getting a hold on laughter that was somehow both elation and defeat.“I love you, and I’m sorry about your legion of issues, but I need to be alone tonight.Okay?”

She studied him.

Eventually, she nodded.“Okay.”And she didn’t look quite so appalled, quite so hurt.

Quite soscared.

He pressed his mouth to hers, because all those things in her expression killed him, and because it soothed something inside of him.Even if he kept it light.

He didn’t want to be tempted to stay, not when there were all these conflicting things swirling around inside of him.Pain and fear and fury and love and laughter and none of it made sense.

He moved past her, started heading for the back door.

“Nate?”

He stopped, afraid to turn around.Afraid of whatever she was going to say.But he stopped and he listened.

“Maybe if you get my… issues, I get yours.You don’t have to talk to me.You don’t have to perform or pretend to be anything but pissed and confused.You don’t have to gohideaway all those emotions to deal with them until you know how to be direct about them.You could just… deal with them.Here.With me.”

He knew how much it cost her to say those things.He knew how much so much of what they kept doing cost her.Because it was no easy feat to fight what you’d been shown your whole life was the truth.

It wasn’t fair to him, but he supposed it wasn’t fair to her either.Because—a lesson he’d never had to learn because it had just always been clear—life wasn’t fucking fair.

He turned to face her.She looked worried.Abouthim.

“Because I love you too,” she said, not even tripping over the words.“Though it’s a hell of a day for those kinds of confessions.”

Confessions.Like it was some dirty secret.

Nate swallowed at how tight his throat had gotten.“Dad could get out of jail.His sentence could be nothing.I don’t know how to sit with that.It makes me fucking furious, and I don’t want to be him.Taking that fury out on everyone else.”

She crossed to him and put her hands on his face.“You could never be him.”

He wished he had that conviction inside of him.But hers made him realize she was right about some things.Isolating was just wallowing.

Staying was proving… something.Even if only to himself.

“I know you want to believe there’s something good in Bo,” he said, not to belabor the point.

Maybe to sidestep the wholeI love youthing until he got a better handle on it, but because he didn’t think she fully understood how he felt about Bo.

God knew he didn’t.“I’m not saying there’s not.But I recognize too many things in him.A lack of backbone for one.He came here because someone told him to.He likely left because someone told him to.”

“Why would they get him here, then tell him to leave?”

“They needed him for something.Now they don’t?We don’t know.We probably won’t.Can’t.I think this is one of those times we’ve just got to weather the storm, Sam.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly.“But together, right?”

“Yeah.Together.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Crawford County Courthouse

Cal knew Bodisappearing was bad news.He wanted to believe that the prosecution had laid the necessary groundwork.The defense might have something up their sleeves, but could it really undo everything Vanderbilt had carefully built?Everything he and his brothers had testified to?Just because Bo wasn’there.Bo was… a tangent, a distraction.

The reality was murder.